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[blankfox_]

Hey hey!

We are a small indie team of two based in Montreal. We've been lurkers on the forum for some time now and we finally decided that it's time to start our own devlog for Fat Mask!

Fat Mask is a fast-paced arcade puzzle brawler in which you compete from 1-4 players to create and STEAL your friends’ Monster Combos.

Gameplay:


Make Combos
Match blocks to create Monster combos. Combos have a timer. Once the timer is over, a monster is created and you get points! While a combo’s timer is active you can add blocks to make it grow bigger and bigger to collect even more points!

Steal Combos
But watch out! If an opponent adds a block of his own, he steals the combo which becomes his! Hurry up and steal it back before the timer runs out!

Close your Combos
A combo’s owner has the opportunity to instantly end that combo’s timer. How? By placing a block next to his combo’s target, which is pointed by arrows, he immediately wins the points!

What it actually looks like:

Greenlight Trailer:

We're very happy to present our work so feel free to share any comments or ask any questions! In the meantime, we'll make sure to regularly share interesting progress in this post.

Thanks!

[blankfox_]

Hey !

We've been working on various things and tried to improve the gaming experience of Fat Mask.

Here are some of the new things :        
-Controller Rumble
-2nd Level
-Screen shake

Do not hesitate if you have any question about the project. We will be posting new stuff quiet soon.

[ZeroTec]

I think your concepts sounds interesting. It's not the typical multiplayer brawler, but the "tetris" mechanic adds a lot of cool and fresh possibilities. I like it

Just one stupid thing on the side: I think one aspect of the character design is super irritating: The shape on his chest.
I assume that's chest hair, but for me it looks like his chest is cut open. I was very confused when I first saw him

[blankfox_]

@ZeroTec

Hey there !

I'm glad to hear that you like the project.

That's actually one of the things we are going for here, mixing brawler elements with puzzle game elements and trying to make a different kind of multiplayer game.

Funny you would think his chest is cut open because you know what ? What you see is actually his cut open chest where he stores the cubes before throwing them.

In fact, the game takes place in a strange post-apocalyptic world where people have weird shapes, weird clothing and definitely weird game shows. Our first character Fat Maxk, that you see here, doesn't escape that rule  

Anyway, your first thought was right. Thanks for your feedback.

[blankfox_]

What to do with blocks in our block game?
(part 1 of 3)

Hello there!
In our team of two, one of my job is to come up with most of the visuals.

This post is the first of three that will go across our adventure to find the holy grail solution to a major visual part of our game: the BLOCKS.

disclaimer: I don't pretend to have found the ultimate solution and I'm pretty sure some change will occur along the ride. In fact, just writing this post and going through our old iterations made me wonder again hehe.

And now some facts:

Fact #1: Fat Mask main mechanic is based around matching blocks.
Fact #2: Blocks in a matching game can be super boring or unappealing... (for me at least)
Fact #3: Blocks can be super awesome.

A matching game needs a bunch of distinct  blocks, this equals to difficulty in getting a coherent look with all the shapes and colors. It was important for me to find something that would be pleasing for the eyes but that would also let us mix match everything together without causing unreadable noise.

We established three main guidelines to what we were excepting from those blocks:

1. Blocks should contribute to a theme (a matching game without a theme can be a bit drab.)
2. Blocks shouldn't create noise when mismatched together and should remain readable.
3. Blocks that are in a closed combo need to merge together and form something interesting.

Those guidelines didn't stop me from creating ideas that where against the ''rules'', but their usefulness was proved when we needed to discard or accept the concepts afterwards. The guidelines kept us aligned.

Now here are a couple of explorations that we went through. Keep in mind, the theme and backstory of the game wasn't set yet. Also, I'll be skipping a bunch of them that were too much close looking or way off. Most of them are also quickly put together and were intended for brainstorming, the quality is usually quite low.

This triggered a solution for us: player would combine monsters to create even bigger monsters. It would give those combos a bit more life. So we ended up choosing a theme before continuing the exploration. We could now refine our search!

In the next post (part 2, ohh) i'll go through some of the variations we did on this theme and how and why we chose what we ended up with.

If you have any suggestions / commentary / questions don't hesitate !!! As I said, this process is still on going and I'm looking forward for some feedback.

[blankfox_]

Monsters cubes
(part 2 of 3)

A quick follow up to the last post.

So we decided to go with monsters. But we still had to decide which kind of monsters cube to adopt.

Again, I explored some variations, which most of them look rather bad:

In the end we went with this

This is what we had for a long time but we weren't satisfied. You can understand that they are ''monster cubes'' but the design is still too noisy. There's too much color variations and details which doesnt look good when all missmatched together. Simplicity is really important, or else it doesn't take long before everything gets unclear and noisy.

I went on to work on other aspects of the game, and after a while I simplified those three last cubes that became this:

One good thing is accomplished with that design: they are quite simple. But theres still a major problem. The green one is pretty much the only one that kind of looks like a monster.

I did this last touch-up to center thing and adjust colors and contrast. I also modified the red one a bit:

Its still not perfect, the problem of identifying them as monsters on the first glimpse is still present. A solution that I want to try pretty soon is to add some life into them. Blinking eyes, face contraction, shake. Little sporadic mouvements that would activate randomly when a player is near one of them or about to do an interaction with them. That will reinforce the monster aspect of the cubes, but once again, it may add too much visual noise into the equation.

In the next post, i'll follow up with the evolution of the visuals for what happens when those little monster cubes are combined and merge together.

[blankfox_]

We made some teasers to present our main characters and hint to our kickstarter launch.

Heres the first one for Fat MaXk.

[blankfox_]

Hello! I need help with some art question.

I've been doing some test to make the cubes look a bit more like monsters so they can fit more with their combo monster counter part. I added some eyes while trying to keep the design not too noisy to stay friendly with the players eyes who needs to always look all over the place.

So my question: Which one feels better while not getting in the way of readability?

Bonus question: Knowing that those little eyes will move when players interact with the cubes, do you think we can understand they represent little creature ?? I am now so used of seeing them that I just don't know anymore :D.


thanks !

Here for fullscreen: http://i.imgur.com/FTDzkHA.png

[blankfox_]

A teaser presenting our second character: Marc-André.

Mik, my partner on this project, strangely finds him scary.

[blankfox_]

I really need to put this thread up and going. Some time in the next days I'll refresh the status of where we are now at PLUS upload some gif to show the current state of the game!

For now, our last teaser introducing Double Trouble.

[blankfox_]

Our Kickstarter is finally up. Have a look and please leave me some comments :D.

Kickstarter here

[blankfox_]

Hey hey! If you can take 10 sec to help out and vote + favorite Fat Mask on Greenlight it would be really appreciated ! Thanks

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=529138291

[Cranktrain]

What a colourful multiplayer game! Looks like a lot of fun, the music sounds really good, and you're going to have no trouble getting through Greenlight with this (I voted!).

On your Greenlight page, you've got languages > "English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Portuguese" which is quite a lot, how are you localising to such a wide number of languages?

Also, what's the working/significance of the name 'Fat Mask'?

[blankfox_]

Hey DizzyDoo!

Thanks for your comment and vote it is really appreciated :D! To answer your questions:

how are you localising to such a wide number of languages?

The only text in the game are in the menus. We are lucky to have every one of those languages covered by friends. Since it won't be a long list of words, they agreed to help us out. Also, on our side, it's not more work to integrate 2 or 9 languages.

what's the working/significance of the name 'Fat Mask'?

Fat Mask is the name of the main character. It used to be Fat Maxk, which was hard to say and a lot of people thought it was a typo so we switched to Fat Mask. There is also one major (small) thing that changed since we chose the title. In a distant past, when you would lead in the rounds of a match, the winning character would wear a unique mask to show off that he was the leader. The idea came from the crowns you get in Towerfall. Right now, we decided to put this on hold. Being a team of two, we constantly need to remind ourselves to keep the scope down if we want to ship the game eventually.

Here is Fat Mask with his mask:

[MereMonkey]

This looks great fun!! Love the music too 

[blankfox_]

Update
I updated the first post to actually show what the game is all about!

This looks great fun!! Love the music too 

Thanks ! Antoine, our super composer, has already made twelve songs plus a winning stinger for each of the characters. Everything he has done so far is really good!

You can listen to the main theme here:
https://soundcloud.com/antoine-vachon-reveirg/dealio-fat-mask-main-theme

The ''jazzy'' version of the main theme, which I really really really love, is featured in the music section of our KS. You can also find a second track + four character stingers over there.
!!!Listen to the jazzy version it so good!!! (scroll down to the music section, or ctrl-f ''soundtrack'')

Let me know if you agree with me!

[MereMonkey]

Everything I heard was really great, and very catchy!!